The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present.

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Publisher's Summary

Audie Award Nominee, Short Stories/Collections, 2013

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.

TO THE IMPURE, ALL THINGS ARE IMPURELike most everyone else I listened to Room and loved it. Like I usually do I searched for another recording of Donoguhe, after listening to the CD. All books audible has by her have low ratings and not so good reviews. I have a promise to myself to not waste a credit on books with low ratings, so I ignored her for a time. Finally I took a chance on this collection of short stories. It is less then seven hours long and they are short stories, so my mental investment was not that long.

THE BRITISH ARE MORE SQUEAMISH ABOUT BEATING THEIR ANIMALS, THEN THEIR CHILDREN.The very first story was Man and Boy. It was a story about an actual man in history and an actual elephant. I am an animal lover and this was a sort of love story between a man and an elephant. I also love historical fiction. This was a great story. All of these stories are based on something in history. Sometimes it was one line in a newspaper in which Emma draws a whole story. Sometimes it is a more in depth knowledge of the historical facts and sometimes it is totally made up, using the facts of the time, such as Snow Blind, which is about the Gold Rush. After each and every story you are told how she came up with the story, so you will know how much is fact and how much is fiction. At the end of the book is an Afterword, which explains the reason for the whole book and it's name Astray.

Emma also brings out some interesting events, which will surprise you. There are stories about gays, cross dressers, tough women, and one involving rape. In one story an adult woman does not find out till after her dad dies, that he was a woman. This is based on historical records. One story is about a man's struggle with his religion, sin and his own sexual desires. There are 14 stories and an afterword. I would give an A grade to four of the stories. I listen and read lots of short story collections and to have that many stories that I would rank that high is very rare. Several stories are average, but none of the stories are awful to listen to. I have found that I like ED's style of writing and regardless of the low ratings, I will take a chance on another of her books.

'Astray' is a fascinating and diverse collection of fourteen short stories/vignettes loosely based on snippets from letters, newspaper articles, footnotes, and other historical documents. Donoghue has taken these small pieces and used both her research and her imagination to flesh them out into complete characters and stories. They range across centuries (from the 17th to the 20th) and are set in various places (London, Texas, Ontario, Massachusetts, and more), and the main characters come from all walks of life: a young Hessian soldier in the Revolutionary war, an elephant keeper, two Gold Rush prospectors, a pair of female sculptors, a runaway slave, a prostitute, a young widowed mother unable to support her child--to name but a few. What they all have in common is that each has in some way taken a life journey that has gone astray, whether due to accident, ambition, corruption, madness, or the pinch of necessity. Each story is followed by a brief explanation of the document that inspired it and what Donoghue learned about the real-life characters' fates. I found two of the stories that were based on letters particularly moving. "Counting Down the Days" tells of a young Irish man who emigrated to Canada, leaving his wife and baby behind; now, at last, she is sailing to join him. In "The Gift," an impoverished young widow reluctantly gives her baby daughter into the care of a social services agency; they place her in a foster home and eventually facilitate her adoption. The story consists of letters written by the birth mother, who attempts to retrieve her lost daughter, and by her adoptive father.

'Astray' bears some similarities to Donoghue's earlier collection, 'The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits,' but her skills as a writer have been finely tuned since 2002. While not all of the stories are equally strong, there is something admirable in each, and something here for everyone. Highly recommended.

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